Story Sparks

September 2024 Story Sparks Calm Amidst Exhaustion Draw alongside the silence of stone Until its calmness can claim you. Be excessively gentle with yourself. Stay clear of those vexed in spirit. Learn to linger around someone of ease Who feels they have all the time in the world. From “For One Who is Exhausted”

July 2024 Story Sparks Boom! Silence This is our second summer at our home and we’d never had a power outage. Fires burned south of us and it’s possible this was a planned outage but we didn’t know. I checked the electrical panel. All looked normal. The evening had lots of light left so

May 2024 Story SparksTraveling MerciesA fourth hummingbird nest has appeared at our little coach in Rancho Mirage. Three other nests with two eggs each have clutched their little families until the juveniles flew off. This one is just outside the slider glass door, beneath a sun awning, on the patio, claiming a spot on the

April 2024 Story Sparks I wrote “The End” for my coastal novel, the first book in a three-book series and met my deadline. Hurrah! Of course, it isn’t really the end but rather the beginning of the next phase. Soon I’ll incorporate my editor’s comments, agree to a title, firm up marketing and publication

March 2024 Story Sparks When I was in High School in Mondovi, Wisconsin, I wrote a column for our school newsletter called “All in the Game with Jane.” It was my first foray into fiction (except for a terrible short story about being lost in Alaska where I’d never been, written in the third grade.

January 2024 Story Sparks A shoutout to the poets begins 2024 even though April is actually National Poetry Month.  An established writer, parent supporter and poet,  L.R.Knost wrote: Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world. All things break. And all things can be mended. Not with time, as they say, but

December 2023 Story Sparks I don’t remember which church I first heard it in, but I know it was a Lutheran congregation. The tune was to the Shaker hymn “’Tis a Gift to be Simple, ‘Tis a Gift to be free” but the lyrics were to a song written in 1963 titled “The Lord

November 2023 Story Sparks It came as a blow to them. It came to me as a gift. It was our first year on the ranch and funds were scarce and so were jobs when you live seven miles from your mailbox and 11 miles from a paved road.  But we’d made the bed

October 2023 Story Sparks Good Work, Good Hearts I won’t get the details correct. I was driving, listening to the radio, and couldn’t find a good place to pull over to write things down. But as soon as I got home I told Jerry. I’d read somewhere that it helps to remember things by

August 2023 Story Sparks Fixing I have a guilty pleasure beside chocolate: it’s watching fixer-upper programs. I also read stories about 700sq ft apartments in New York City that go from a bathroom-size home to looking like we’re inside the Taj Mahal. Not that I’ll ever do a single thing those creative people do